Monthly Archives: October 2015

WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? Did sharks pop into your head? If so, you may have galeophobia, which stops thousands of Americans from swimming at the beach every year. Maybe you thought of flying, because you’re terrified of crashing or being confined to a small space.

Most people with herpes don’t know they have it, which is probably how almost two-thirds of the global population ended up with the virus. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO)announced that, “More than 3.7 billion people under the age of 50, or 67 percent of the population, are infected with herpes simplex virus type 1.”

An international team of marine biologists has made the first-ever field observations of rare Omura’s whales—one of the least known species of whales in the world — while working off the coast of Madagascar.

In the past couple decades, sports science has made giant strides on every front — conditioning, nutrition, recovery, equipment, surgery, injury prevention. But all those gains come with a big asterisk: a reminder that individual results may vary. Some athletes respond seemingly overnight to high-intensity interval training; some see middling results. Some enjoy amazing recoveries from knee-ligament reconstructions; others never really heal. For athletes who feel like they’re doing everything right, this seeming arbitrariness can be discouraging and infuriating.

The strange, duck-shaped comet that ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft has been orbiting for more than a year just got a bit stranger: Like plants on Earth, the comet is blowing molecular oxygen, O2, into the space around it. Molecular oxygen is thought to be rare in the cosmos – or at least exceptionally tricky to detect.